• NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      It’s worth checking out the contribs and talk regarding articles that can be divisive. People acting with ulterior motives and inserting their own bias are fairly common. They also make regular corrections for this reason. I still place more faith and trust in Wikipedia as an info source more than most news articles.

    • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      There’s a lot of problems with Wikipedia, but in my years editing there (I’m extended protected rank), I’ve come to terms that it’s about as good as it can be.

      In all but one edit war, the better sourced team came out on top. Source quality discussion is also quite good. There’s a problem with positive/negative tone in articles, and sometimes articles get away with bad sourcing before someone can correct it, but this is about as good as any information hub can get.

      • vin@lemmynsfw.com
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        2 months ago

        And don’t forget the British-American bias. Hopefully the automated translation and adaptation that is being pursued by wikipedia helps to improve it.

        • Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 months ago

          I remember in the past few years that I’ve had to switch to non-American or non-British versions of Wikipedia just in order to find the answer I was looking for.

          We need to remind Americans and Britains that knowledge on Wikipedia doesn’t stop with their languages. We need to do a better job of gathering knowledge from non-English sources and translating those into English. Same goes vice versa for English sources and pages into languages that other people can understand.

          There’s still a lot of work to be done with Wikipedia to make it truly a universal knowledge repository. But it is one of the best we have

        • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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          2 months ago

          It was about whether Bitcoin Cash was referred to as “Bcash” or not.

          I forget the semantics, but there were a lot of sources calling it Bcash, but then there were equally reliable sources saying that was only the name given by detractors. The war was something about how Bcash should be referenced in the opening paragraph

          • markko@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Thank you very much!

            I’m glad it was at least about something fairly trivial.